Check Out Some of the Records that Helped Us Dramatically Improve Our Playback Quality

What kept me obsessed about records and audio equipment were the the feelings I had when hearing the music I loved. (Click on this YouTube video to hear the great Leonard Bernstein talk about it.)

I pursued audio and found that I could get the music I loved to sound better and better with each passing year (well, some years anyway), starting with the first piece of equipment that changed everything in audio for me. It was a great leap forward, and thankfully it turned out to be the first of many. This is partly because I was never married to any piece of equipment or brand. (If all your equipment is made by the same company, there is almost no chance it would not benefit by replacing one component or another. But how can you do that? Then they won’t all match!)

Eventually these pursuits came to drive the success of the business, such as it is. To be clear, without an addiction to good music with good sound, there would never have been a business.

When I play a record with music that has the potential to bring me joy, I feel a powerful urge to hear it right. If I can’t hear it right, I won’t enjoy it, or at the very least I won’t enjoy it as much, and knowing that the music I am playing could sound better than what I might be hearing in that moment becomes a source of frustration and disrupts the joy of listening. I feel the need to reduce my frustration in order to increase my enjoyment.

And this is where the practice of doing audio comes in to play.

If enjoying a particular piece of music means finding a better sounding pressing of that music, then that’s what I have to do.

If it means improving the stereo or room, then I must find a way to make the stereo or the room better.

This is of course the most frustrating aspect of our collective audiophile pursuits. It is rarely easy to find the right record or make the right change to the stereo or room.

But this is the challenge we must face if we care enough about the music to need to hear it right.

Let the music be your guide. If the sound of most of the records you play satisfies you, great.

If it doesn’t, and you want higher quality pressings, we can help.

And if you want to better your listening skills in order to either improve your stereo or your record collection, please consider following our advice. If you do what we did, working hard and spend plenty of time and money, your success is practically guaranteed.